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Host Francesca Rheannon talks to Peter Manseau about his novel [amazon-product text=”SONGS FOR THE BUTCHERS DAUGHTER” type=”text”]1416538712[/amazon-product] and to Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop about her new novel, [amazon-product text=”DECEMBER” type=”text”]0307388573[/amazon-product]. Continue reading
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In Part One of this week’s show, we talk with writer and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams about her new book, [amazon-product text=”Finding Beauty in a Broken World” type=”text”]0375420789[/amazon-product]. (Part Two, David Danelo talking about THE BORDER: Exploring the U.S.-Mexican Divide, will appear as a separate podcast.) Continue reading
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Host Francesca Rheannon talks with comix master Art Spiegelman. When Spiegelman’s [amazon-product text=”Maus I: A Survivors Tale: My Father Bleeds History” type=”text”]0394747232[/amazon-product] was published in 1986, (followed by [amazon-product text=”Maus II: A Survivors Tale: And Here My Troubles Began” type=”text”]0679729771[/amazon-product] in 1991), it exploded notions about the limited role of comix as art and literature.
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Winning a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992–the only comic book ever to do so–Maus is a memoir in graphic form of Spiegelman’s father’s experiences in Auschwitz and the impact that had on the artist’s own childhood growing up in New York City. His mother was also a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. In 1968, she committed suicide, soon after Spiegelman himself was released from a mental hospital after suffering a nervous breakdown.
Maus was prefigured in an earlier work, Prisoner on the Hell Planet and in 1978 Spiegelman included that and other works in a collection of his underground comix called [amazon-product text=”Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!” type=”text”]0375423958[/amazon-product]. Innovative and drawn in a variety of styles in large format–the book sank like a stone. But now Spiegelman has “re-birthed it”, as he told me, with a new 20 page introduction and an afterword. We talk to him about BREAKDOWNS and breaking conventions in the comix.
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Also, investigative journalist Greg Palast talks about the new comic book he produced with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., [amazon-product text=”STEAL BACK YOUR VOTE!” type=”text”]061525781X[/amazon-product]. With illustrations by Ted Rall and other artists, the book is about the threat of massive voter suppression in the upcoming election and how to counter it. [Note: the audio to this segment has been removed.]
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[amazon-product align=”right”]1597260843[/amazon-product]Francesca talks with journalist Nancy Nichols connects her wrenching personal story to the larger story of toxic pollution. Nichols grew up in Waukegan, on Lake Michigan. The lake has been massively contaminated by PCB and other toxic chemicals. She survived cancer but her sister did not. Her memoir is LAKE EFFECT: Two Sisters and a Town’s Toxic Legacy.
EPA Report downplaying Bisphenol A hazards
John Peterson Myers on Bisphenol A link to metabolic disorders in Environmental Health News
We talk with David Lovelace about his memoir, SCATTERSHOT: My Bipolar Family. And Maggie Jackson tells us about DISTRACTED: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Continue reading
Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor talks about her memoir, MY STROKE OF INSIGHT: A BRAIN SCIENTIST’S PERSONAL JOURNEY.
The audio for this episode is available upon request for a donation of $4.99 to Writers Voice. Contact writersvoice [at] wmua.org.
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Host Francesca Rheannon talks with Ta-Nehisi Coates about his memoir, [amazon-product text=”The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood” type=”text”]0385527462[/amazon-product].
[Note: the original show episode has been replaced by the unedited, full interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates.] Continue reading
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Greg Palast, investigative reporter for the BBC, tells us why he thinks the Eliot Spitzer scandal broke when it did — and what federal prosecutors were trying to keep hidden from the public about the bank bailout by taking Spitzer down.
Here’s a link to a Nation article that tells the story.
Then we go to the Nieman Foundation’s Conference on Narrative Journalism. We talk with broadcast and print journalist John Hockenberry about interactive media, BU journalism department chair Louis Ureneck about memoir, and Nieman narrative program director Connie Hale about what “narrative journalism” is all about.
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We talk with John Elder Robison about his memoir, [amazon-product text=”Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Aspergers” type=”text”]0307396185[/amazon-product]. Brother to best-selling author Augusten Burroughs (RUNNING WITH SCISSORS), Robison has written a sweet, compelling tale about growing up with Asperger’s Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. From the inside, he reveals what it’s like to be a misfit, the savant-like talents he feels Asperger’s gave him, and how he overcame the condition’s deficits and celebrated its gifts.
Click here for a Web-only interview extra..
We also talk with Free Press director Josh Silver about new developments in the fight to preserve net neutrality.
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We talk with John Elder Robison about his wonderful memoir, LOOK ME IN THE EYE: My Life With Asperger’s.
Click the following link to hear a Web-only clip from our interview with John Elder Robison: what he told his kid about who Santa Claus really is…
And you can listen to the full interview here.
We talk with author Susan Cheever about AMERICAN BLOOMSBURY and Pamela Thompson tells us about her debut novel, EVERY PAST THING.
Today’s show begins in the early nineteenth century and ends in that century’s last year-November, 1899. We start our time travel with our first guest Susan Cheever. She takes us to Concord, MA where a “genius cluster” of great American writers gathered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her book is AMERICAN BLOOMSBURY: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. She says these writers, popularly known as “The Transcendentalists”, invented a new form of American literature that often came from the yearnings, erotic passions, and disappointments they so deeply felt. Cheever tells us about the ambivalent relationship between Emerson and Thoreau, how Nathanial Hawthorne turned his despair into THE SCARLET LETTER and why Louisa May Alcott began writing LITTLE WOMEN. The daughter of the American writer John Cheever, Susan Cheever is the also the author of the memoir AS GOOD AS I COULD BE, published in 2001, as well as numerous other books.
“Every past thing becomes strange.” That’s how the protagonist of Pamela Thompson’s debut novel EVERY PAST THING begins the journal she writes within the book. Mary Jane Elmer is a young woman in 1899 who’s come to New York from Shelburne, Massachusetts with her husband, the painter Edwin Romanzo Elmer. She and Edwin are still mourning the death of their young daughter, Effie, but Mary Jane’s thoughts are also taken up by her romantic longings for a young student with whom she had a brief encounter 10 years before. Thompson’s novel covers only the course of a week, but the boook’s depth and beautiful prose takes the reader on a far and satisfying journey. Pamela Thompson lives in western Massachusetts.
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We talk with veteran journalist and commentator Normon Solomon about his memoir, [amazon-product text=”Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State” type=”text”]0977825345[/amazon-product].
Read an excerpt of his book here.
Also, we talk with novelist Valerie Martin about her wonderful new novel, [amazon-product text=”TRESPASS” type=”text”]1400095514[/amazon-product]. Some of Martin’s other novels include [amazon-product text=”The Confessions of Edward Day” type=”text”]0385525842[/amazon-product] (2009) and [amazon-product text=”Mary Reilly” type=”text”]0375725997[/amazon-product].
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We talk with former therapist and now best-selling author Jacqueline Sheehan about her novel, LOST AND FOUND. A widowed psychologist finds the path to her own recovery from grief with the help of a black labrador retriever with a healing touch.
Also, Sigmund Freud’s granddaughter Sophie Freud tells us about about her memoir, LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF THE FREUD FAMILY. We hear about her childhood in pre-war Austria, her famous grandfather, and her dysfunctional family of origin. Now a retired social worker living in New England, Freud weaves together diaries, letters and memoir to reconstruct her flight from Nazi-occupied Austria, the agonizing wait for a visa from Nice, France, and her eventual escape from a Europe embroiled in war.
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Psychologist David Elkind, author of The Hurried Child, talks about THE POWER OF PLAY: How Spontaneous, Imaginative Activities Lead to Happier, Healthier Children. Also, Patty Dann talks about THE GOLDFISH WENT ON VACATION: A Memoir of Loss (and Learning to Tell the Truth about It).